May 2025 Summaries

Nexxiot, a TradeTech pioneer in tracking unpowered freight assets using solar-powered IoT devices, adopted CockroachDB as their primary database to meet the demands of their global platform. With a focus on resilience, scalability, and minimal operational overhead, Nexxiot's Principal Site Reliability Engineer Alexander Berger selected CockroachDB over other distributed SQL databases due to its ability to deliver horizontal scaling, strong consistency, and cloud-native operations without compromise. The company transitioned to CockroachDB alongside their existing stack, introducing it gradually while maintaining a low-pressure adoption strategy, allowing them to realize early benefits and reap improved reliability and responsiveness for their customers. Today, Nexxiot operates dedicated CockroachDB clusters in multiple regions, ensuring compliance with data sovereignty requirements while optimizing latency, and has achieved seamless upgrades, consistent availability, and predictable scaling, making it an ideal choice for teams requiring a transactional, globally scalable OLTP system.

The traditional approach to database benchmarking has been stuck in the past, focusing on peak performance in isolated lab environments. However, modern applications are globally distributed, always-on, and increasingly complex, with real-world operations such as rolling upgrades, schema changes, and backups. This has led to a shift towards measuring resilience, recovery, and sustained "Performance under Adversity" rather than just peak performance. CockroachDB has released a novel methodology for benchmarking modern databases that tests the impact of real-world conditions faced by application and infrastructure teams every day, including seven escalating phases of adversity in a single continuous run, each introducing progressively harsher failure conditions and operational stress. The benchmark measures throughput in transactions per minute (tpmC), latency, and recovery time to baseline, providing insight into resilience and sustained performance.

Resilience Roadshow Recap: 4 Cities, Countless Convos on Building What’s Next` was a tour of four cities in the US, where hundreds of data professionals gathered to discuss building resilient applications and infrastructure. The event series covered topics such as database deployment, generative AI ecosystems, and regulatory compliance, with a focus on CockroachDB's capabilities for high availability and disaster recovery. Attendees shared real-world perspectives and experiences, including the importance of resilience being an architectural priority throughout the stack, and the need to modernize applications for generative AI. The tour also featured panel discussions, hands-on labs, and spontaneous whiteboard sessions, and provided a clear path for building AI into existing ecosystems using CockroachDB. The event aimed to address data professionals' growing concerns about downtime's impact and revenue losses, and offered attendees a chance to explore CockroachDB's resilience capabilities through a free trial or on AWS Marketplace.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a framework of business processes, policies, and technologies that enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons. It addresses three core questions: Who are you? What are you allowed to do? Are you following the rules? IAM consists of authentication, authorization, and accountability components, which work together to ensure secure access control. The system must be highly available, scalable, and globally distributed, with strong consistency and transactional guarantees to support real-time access decisions and compliance monitoring. A modern IAM system needs to handle managing local authentications, supporting the rest of IAM is a layer called Administration, which has three major pillars: Authentication, Authorization, and Accountability. The article explores how distributed databases like CockroachDB are enabling a new standard of always-on, scalable, and globally distributed IAM.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers a compelling alternative to VMware, providing cost efficiency, consistent operations, and open standards. This unified platform merges kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) and Kubernetes containers into a single control plane, simplifying infrastructure and operational overhead. By consolidating onto a single platform, enterprises often reduce infrastructure sprawl, license expenses, and administrative complexity. OpenShift Virtualization is hybrid cloud-ready, allowing organizations to span data centers, private clouds, and public clouds - facilitating a measured, step-wise migration away from purely on-premises environments. For highly regulated industries, the ability to keep workloads on-premises under a standardized platform while selectively extending to the public cloud delivers both agility and compliance. With virtualization and containers managed together, organizations can steadily refactor or containerize VMs over time without abrupt migrations, mitigating risk during modernization. CockroachDB offers a distributed SQL database that is highly scalable, resilient, and truly cloud-native, providing strong consistency, resilience & fault tolerance, and cloud-native capabilities. In OpenShift Virtualization environments, CockroachDB's shared-nothing model is fully realized, with each VM pinned to its own worker node, eliminating noisy-neighbor issues commonly found in resource-shared deployments. The deployment of CockroachDB on OpenShift Virtualization provides a forward-looking solution to modernize infrastructure while protecting mission-critical data and workflows.

CockroachDB's Change Data Capture (CDC) and Apache Kafka's distributed event streaming platform enable real-time analytics in MMORPGs, allowing for better game balancing, fraud detection, and dynamic world adjustments. By setting up CockroachDB CDC with Kafka, developers can capture player actions, combat logs, economy transactions, and server events in real-time, enabling more accurate analysis of the in-game economy. This setup involves deploying a single-node CockroachDB instance, installing Kafka and Zookeeper, creating a changefeed to stream data into Kafka, and verifying the data flow. With this pipeline in place, developers can build real-time analytics pipelines for MMORPGs, including use cases such as building dashboards with Apache Druid or Grafana, leveraging AI for in-game reactions, and boosting the gaming experience with predictive analytics.

CockroachDB's row-level Time-To-Live (TTL) feature allows MMORPGs to efficiently manage transient data, ensuring that old or unnecessary data does not impact database performance. By implementing row-level TTL, developers can automate the expiration and deletion of data, reducing storage costs and maintaining optimal query performance during high-traffic events. Additionally, CockroachDB's distributed SQL architecture supports REGIONAL BY ROW locality, which optimally stores and accesses game data per region, reducing latency and improving player experience. To implement row-level TTL in CockroachDB, developers can follow a step-by-step approach that includes understanding what data needs TTL, enabling row-level TTL on a per-table basis, monitoring and optimizing TTL performance, handling TTL during high ingestion periods, and utilizing regional locality for multi-region deployments. By leveraging these features, MMORPGs can scale effortlessly, allowing devs to focus on the fun of gameplay rather than database maintenance.

The text discusses the benefits of distributed SQL systems in 2025 and beyond, particularly with CockroachDB as a leader in this transformation. It highlights how traditional relational databases struggle to scale horizontally or tolerate failure across data centers and geographies. Distributed SQL breaks this model, offering elastic scalability, global availability, and unwavering consistency. CockroachDB is designed for the cloud-native world, providing strong ACID transaction guarantees, always-on availability, and global scale with local latency. It also delivers strong consistency without sacrifice, speaking the language developers already know, and supporting sophisticated transactional queries and joins. The database is built for the future of application architecture, trusted by industry leaders, and simplifies operations while reducing total cost of ownership.

The Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience Framework (CSCRF) is a regulatory framework created by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to help organizations in the securities market improve their cybersecurity posture. The framework aims to tackle emerging cyber risks, align with industry best practices, reduce audit-related toil, and maintain regulatory compliance. It provides a structured approach for regulated entities (REs) to classify themselves into five categories based on operational scope and thresholds, and outlines key security controls to mitigate various types of cyber threats. CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, can help REs achieve CSCRF compliance by providing features such as high availability, built-in encryption, audit logging and monitoring, fine-grained access control, and scalable architecture, designed to ensure resilience and operational continuity in the face of cyber threats. The framework is not just about today's cybersecurity issues but also considers future threats like quantum computing, emphasizing the need for ongoing risk evaluations and strong data security measures.

The text discusses the CockroachCloud API, which allows users to seamlessly transition between CockroachDB Basic and Standard plans without downtime. The API is suitable for upgrades and downgrades within the same region, but backup and restore can also be used in such scenarios, particularly if a fresh start or rollback from a ransomware attack is needed. When migrating to a different region, backup and restore is the only option available. The text provides step-by-step instructions on how to use the API for upgrading from Basic to Standard and downgrading from Standard to Basic. Key considerations when migrating include private link and endpoint connectivity, zero downtime, backup and restore flexibility, cost optimization, and regional migrations. Understanding when to use the API versus backup and restore is crucial for informed decision-making that aligns with business needs.